Punt-taking chancers and other misrepresentatives

By the time you’ve read this story, in the unlikely event you bother, someone somewhere will have wilfully misrepresented their particulars to a motor insurer.

That’s right, Friends, worrying new figures concocted by the Association of Brish Insurers (ABI) reveal that, when it comes to motor insurance applications, truths are bent, facts are altered, and punts taken on a truly industrial scale.

Each year there are quite literally too many fraudulous insurance applications to count, 180,675 of them according to the ABI.

In case you’re a bit tragic at maths, that’s a staggering 3,475 per week, 496 of them a day, an equally staggering 21 every hour, or (again, with an exactly equivalent degree of staggeringness) one fraudulent application every three minutes (on average), considerably more at peak times, when fraudulent applications sometimes have to be ‘stacked’ in circular rotation over busy call centres.

If you think these figures suggest insurers are pretty good at spotting and turning away dishonest applications, forget that thought! The ABI calculates that the legions of fraudsome applications insurers merrily wave through each year are forcing them to “add around £50 to every household’s annual insurance bill.” Which certainly seems harsh on those who don’t own cars.

ABI claims fraud chief Ade Curr insists that “the way to get the best deal is to play it straight with the insurer”. But, with almost a fifth of a million people persisting in putting an unsustainably positive gloss on their application each year, this message clearly isn’t getting through.

There are two types of people who “undermine the underwriting process” with “consequences for honest customers” explains Ben Feltcher of the Fraud Insurance Bureau (FBI): “chancers who take a punt” and “those who deliberately provide false information at the stage of applying for an insurance policy.”

For an insight into the precise difference between the two, or to find out why there is no third category of ‘chancers who take a punt by wilfully providing false information at the stage of applying for an insurance policies’, you will have to ask someone a great deal cleverer than Bankstone News.